Wat is een Bitcoin Bron: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin

Bitcoin (afkorting BTC) is een cryptovaluta en een globaal betaalmiddel (als systeem wordt Bitcoin met een hoofdletter geschreven, als munteenheid vaak met een kleine letter). Het is de eerste gedecentraliseerde digitale munt die werkt zonder centrale bank of centrale beheerder. Het netwerk is peer-to-peer en de transacties gebeuren tussen de gebruikers onderling, zonder tussenpersoon. Deze transacties worden geverifieerd via netwerk nodes (een node is een computer waar de volledige blockchain (database) opstaat ) door het gebruik van cryptografie en worden opgeslagen in een openbare gedistribueerde database, gekend als een blockchain, waar gemiddeld eens in de 10 minuten een blok aan wordt toegevoegd. Het concept van een blockchain is voor het eerst in 1998 beschreven door Wei Dai op de cypherpunks-mailinglist, en in 2009 geïmplementeerd als opensourcesoftware onder de naam Bitcoin door Satoshi Nakamoto (pseudoniem van een onbekende persoon of groep). Satoshi (afgekort sat) werd later ook de naam van de kleinste rekeneenheid van bitcoin: 1 satoshi = 1/100.000.000 bitcoin (één honderdmiljoenste van één bitcoin) of 0,01 microbitcoin.

Het genesisblok, het eerste blok op de bitcoinblockchain, werd op 3 januari 2009 om 18:15:05 GMT (19:15:05 Midden-Europese Tijd) gegenereerd en bevatte de tekst: "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks". De eerste bitcointransactie werd verstuurd door Satoshi Nakamoto naar Hal Finney op 12 januari 2009. Vanaf die dag tot begin 2016 vonden ongeveer 100 miljoen bitcointransacties plaats. In 2020 was dit opgelopen tot 300 miljoen.

Wat is een Blockchain Bron: http://www.watisblockchain.nl/wat_is_blockchain.php

Zie ook Blockchain tutorial (technisch) 

Om eenvoudig uit te leggen wat een blockchain nu is kan deze vorm van databeheer het beste worden vergeleken met een database. Het universele grootboek van de blockchain is niets anders dan een grote database. Een database die gedeeld is met iedereen ter wereld. 1 met gegevens waarbij iedereen die meedoet (nodes) een exacte kopie van die database krijgt en kan zien wat erin staat. Iedereen kan vervolgens ook wijzigingen aanbrengen. En wanneer er een wijziging optreedt, dan wordt deze aanpassing direct overgenomen op alle andere computers waarop de database staat (nodes). Het resultaat is dat iedereen altijd dezelfde database heeft. Overal ter wereld, op elk moment.
Er is echter één eigenschap die blockchains uniek maakt. En dat is dat aan een blockchain alleen nieuwe regels toegevoegd kunnen worden. In feite is hiermee het enige wat een blockchain doet het toevoegen van nieuwe rijen of records, die automatisch met iedereen worden gedeeld. Het is niet mogelijk om een wijziging door te voeren in eerder toegevoegde regels. De cryptografische software zorgt hier voor, door het combineren van alle rekenkracht in het netwerk voor de controle van de toevoegingen en het weigeren van mutaties.

Het zijn uiteindelijk de miners die beslissen welke transacties in er een blok worden gestoken. Hoe meer "fee" (soort commissie) je betaalt (aan de miner) hoe sneller je transactie in een blok zal gestoken worden en hoe sneller deze alzo bevestigd en dus uitgevoerd wordt. Voor het "vinden" van de hashwaarde van een block krijgt de miner een beloning. Deze beloning halveert om de 210.000 blocks wat neerkomt op ongeveer 4 jaar.  Op moment van het schrijven van deze tekst (26/08/2020) is de beloning 6.25 bitcoin. Wanneer zal er een volgende halvering plaatshebben? Kijk even hier. 

How Bitcoin Mining Works (bron: http://www.coindesk.com/information/how-bitcoin-mining-works/)

In traditional fiat money systems, governments simply print more money when they need to. But in bitcoin, money isn’t printed at all – it is discovered. Computers around the world ‘mine’ for coins by competing with each other.

How does mining take place?

People are sending bitcoins to each other over the bitcoin network all the time, but unless someone keeps a record of all these transactions, no-one would be able to keep track of who had paid what. The bitcoin network deals with this by collecting all of the transactions made during a set period into a list, called a block. It’s the miners’ job to confirm those transactions, and write them into a general ledger.

Making a hash of it

how bitcoin mining worksThis general ledger is a long list of blocks, known as the 'blockchain'. It can be used to explore any transaction made between any bitcoin addresses, at any point on the network. Whenever a new block of transactions is created, it is added to the blockchain, creating an increasingly lengthy list of all the transactions that ever took place on the bitcoin network. A constantly updated copy of the block is given to everyone who participates, so that they know what is going on.

But a general ledger has to be trusted, and all of this is held digitally. How can we be sure that the blockchain stays intact, and is never tampered with? This is where the miners come in.

When a block of transactions is created, miners put it through a process. They take the information in the block, and apply a mathematical formula to it, turning it into something else. That something else is a far shorter, seemingly random sequence of letters and numbers known as a hash. This hash is stored along with the block, at the end of the blockchain at that point in time.

Hashes have some interesting properties. It’s easy to produce a hash from a collection of data like a bitcoin block, but it’s practically impossible to work out what the data was just by looking at the hash. And while it is very easy to produce a hash from a large amount of data, each hash is unique. If you change just one character in a bitcoin block, its hash will change completely.

Miners don’t just use the transactions in a block to generate a hash. Some other pieces of data are used too. One of these pieces of data is the hash of the last block stored in the blockchain.

Because each block’s hash is produced using the hash of the block before it, it becomes a digital version of a wax seal. It confirms that this block – and every block after it – is legitimate, because if you tampered with it, everyone would know.

If you tried to fake a transaction by changing a block that had already been stored in the blockchain, that block’s hash would change. If someone checked the block’s authenticity by running the hashing function on it, they’d find that the hash was different from the one already stored along with that block in the blockchain. The block would be instantly spotted as a fake.

Because each block’s hash is used to help produce the hash of the next block in the chain, tampering with a block would also make the subsequent block’s hash wrong too. That would continue all the way down the chain, throwing everything out of whack.

Competing for coins

Butterfly Labs Bitforce mining rigSo, that’s how miners ‘seal off’ a block. They all compete with each other to do this, using software written specifically to mine blocks. Every time someone successfully creates a hash, they get a reward of 25 bitcoins, the blockchain is updated, and everyone on the network hears about it. That’s the incentive to keep mining, and keep the transactions working.

The problem is that it’s very easy to produce a hash from a collection of data. Computers are really good at this. The bitcoin network has to make it more difficult, otherwise everyone would be hashing hundreds of transaction blocks each second, and all of the bitcoins would be mined in minutes. The bitcoin protocol deliberately makes it more difficult, by introducing something called ‘proof of work’.

The bitcoin protocol won’t just accept any old hash. It demands that a block’s hash has to look a certain way; it must have a certain number of zeroes at the start. There’s no way of telling what a hash is going to look like before you produce it, and as soon as you include a new piece of data in the mix, the hash will be totally different.

Miners aren’t supposed to meddle with the transaction data in a block, but they must change the data they’re using to create a different hash. They do this using another, random piece of data called a ‘nonce’. This is used with the transaction data to create a hash. If the hash doesn’t fit the required format, the nonce is changed, and the whole thing is hashed again. It can take many attempts to find a nonce that works, and all the miners in the network are trying to do it at the same time. That’s how miners earn their bitcoins.

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